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Different cultures celebrate Christmas at different days and time zones are a thing. But it's Christmas here, so:

Merry Christmas to everyone. I hope you get some rest and can spend time with people who are dear to you and get to focus on what's important rather than getting lost in stressing about everything having to be perfect.

Also much love to everyone who cannot spend their Christmas with dear people.

To make sure this post meets the relevancy criteria, here is a Wikipedia article about some Christmas (more precisely advent) tradition which I personally really like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_market

After finishing my PhD in earth sciences, I pivoted to software engineering. I’ve spent the last 8 years as a full-stack developer, gaining a decent grasp of various stacks and frameworks.

I’m now at a point where I want to merge my scientific background with my engineering experience. However, I’m finding a "missing middle" in the job market. I don't ever see a position that requires and values deep expertise in both.

I enjoy development, but I feel like my scientific training is going to waste. For those who have successfully merged these two paths:

Did you find a "unicorn" role, or did you create one within a company?

How do you market yourself when your two halves feel like they belong to different resumes?

I am a mid-level backend engineer with 4 yoe. I come from the world's most populous country. I was laid off 1.5 years ago. I travelled for half of the time, the rest half just passed by doing nothing although I learnt some AI fundamentals.

I hate leetcode and that keeps me away from most of the job opportunities. I have some money left just enough to get by for the next 6 months. I dont want to work here since they dont value humans here. Realistically, moving abroad is tough but I want to! I applied to a lot of startups but not getting any positive response.

Like most of us (?) I like to code for fun but hate it as work. I am not an AI doomer but believe human force would be cut by a sizeable amount in the foreseeable future in SWE. But then what's left apart from doing coding? I dont have any business ideas and doing it here in this country is just cumbersome.

Content creation comes to my mind but it's also tough out there. I really don't know what I should be doing.

1.5 years have gone by. But I want to make the rest of upcoming 6 months of great use in finding my calling. I can chatgpt my problem but I yearn for human responses. Thank you.

Dear all,

do we have an statistics on visitor location/country here?

Would be curious: Is it US-centered? How much people from LatAm or SEA? EU?

Maybe there was a question like this in the past, but I couldnt find it.

(Maybe this is a question for @dang?)

If you're inordinately in front of a computer screen for a living, day in day out, week after week, when you've finally had enough and need a break, what works for you to counter it?

No matter the weather (UK, its grey and dank), or locale, a timer and an enforced outdoor solo walk generally perks me up.

Super casual post (typed on my phone, while lying on my bed), tried a lot of things but this is sticking. So I had to tell you because it may help some of you that are math curious like me.

Sleep issues is tough, it took me 5 years and a friend who is a doctor. The Dutch medical system failed me but my doctor friend saved me from a lifetime of insomnia. In my case it is: 0.3 mg melatonin + 7.5 mg mirtazapine (anti-histamine, it makes me drowsy) + meditation + sleep hygiene. Your experience may be different.

Math academy: I need to be told what to do. Designing my own curriculum is too much. Also, I need to pair it with a solid LLM because I have a lot of why questions and of course channels like 3B1B.

iPad: I tried pen and paper multiple times. The thing is: sometimes I just want to be in a slob and lie on my bed in weird ways and still do math. I found I need a pen, I can’t do it on pure memory. An iPad where I can do split screen: Math academy + MyScript (formerly Nebo) is nice. An Apple Pencil Pro is really nice because I don’t need to worry about connection issues.

I was doubting between: ipad vs pen and paper (the nth retry) vs Remarkable. I am happy I got a second hand ipad air. I can stick to this routine.

Low-key life changing.

I know this setup isn’t for everyone.

I can’t tell if I’m feeling the collapse of OpenAI hype. Or if there are legitimately more ChatGPT bugs

Notably it suddenly is pretty bad at chat?

Ask a question

(Get a reasonable answer)

Ask a follow on question

(Give first an answer to the first question, then my second question)

It’s not just this, I also click on images in my library and ask for modifications, and ChatGPT then says “please attach the image”

All very frustrating. Anyone feel this as late? I just end up using Claude more

I’m looking for examples of high-quality engineering blog posts—especially from tech company blogs, that go beyond surface-level explanations.

Specifically interested in posts that: 1. Explain technical concepts clearly and concisely 2. Show real implementation details, trade-offs, and failures 3. Are well-structured and readable 4. Tie engineering decisions back to business or product outcomes

Any standout blogs, posts, or platforms you regularly learn from?

I downloaded it and compiled it and ran some toy programs. I have no idea how to use it for an actual project even though I have a stack of dusty rpi's and esp32s in the drawer.

Any one want to share their inspiration?

If you have fond memories of misspending entirely too much of your youth on web-based message boards, or you would like to misspend more of your nights and weekends on them now, Google has you covered. Simply add

  inurl:viewtopic.php

  inurl:"index.php?topic="

  inurl:showthread.php

  croissant AND (inurl:viewtopic.php OR inurl:showthread.php OR inurl:"index.php?topic=")

HN puts the Christmas banner and alternating colors. I am curious what percentage of HN community celebrates Christmas vs. not at all, another religion, or born Christian but doesn't celebrate etc.

Note: When I was in college (years ago) I asked an admin this and he said point blank 'face it it's a Christian world'

And what IT issue will you (probably) fix today?

I’ve spent a decade doing frontend work. It pays pretty well but I am essentially just making modals and dropdowns for CRUD apps. I crave more purpose in life but understand the most rational choice is to keep going and saving for retirement.

Does it make sense to change direction at this point? I envy PhDs working on self-driving cars and rockets and AI. But also question overall morality of the tech industry.

Dear HN,

I’m a solo operator with no paying customers yet. I wanted more predictable baseline costs while iterating on a side project, so I migrated from App Engine to Cloud Run.

I fed my setup, budget, and constraints as context into Gemini CLI, asked it to search official documentation and best practices, and followed that guidance.

I removed –min-instances=1, expecting autoscaling to reduce idle spend. The commit message claimed “60% cost savings.” The actual outcome was roughly an 1,800% increase and a surprise decline message when I went to buy coffee on my credit card.

From Nov 2 to Dec 14, Cloud Run accrued ~$4,676. There was no traffic spike, no abuse, no application bug. The services were mostly idle.

What compounded: CPU and memory were over-provisioned (4 CPU, 16Gi) from earlier experimentation. Each deploy created a new revision, and I deployed frequently while iterating. Those revisions must have stayed warm longer than expected. Autoscaling plus revision sprawl meant more active resources than intuition suggested, even without traffic.

The billing alert failure: I had alerts enabled at $50. I received one early notification, then silence as spend climbed another $4,600. There were no clear signals that my cost profile had materially changed.

I contacted Google Cloud Billing Support looking for clear guidance or partial relief. After review, they declined any adjustment and closed the case. As a solo dev without an account team, there was no escalation path beyond accepting the charges.

Where it stands now: After right-sizing resources and cleaning up revision sprawl, daily costs dropped from ~$200 to under $5 on my billing dashboard. I’m cautiously optimistic but not certain it’s fully resolved.

For those running Cloud Run longer term: How do you actually cap downside as a solo dev? Do you set hard budget caps and accept downtime? Are there deployment patterns that avoid revision sprawl? Is App Engine still preferable purely for cost predictability? What guardrails work that don’t depend on constant manual billing checks?

I wasn’t chasing scale. I was trying to be careful with money while building alone. I’d appreciate hearing what others would do differently.

Hey all, didn't want to pay for Strong or Hevy so I started building my own lifts journal app.

It's free and always will be.

https://stronk.app

Source Code (open to contributions). If you find bugs, add it to the issues. If you don't use it now but plan to after I build out the features, please star the project so I know to keep working on it.

https://github.com/alshdavid/stronk

There a lot to do still, gotta add things like;

- Strava/Facebook Sync

- Import/Export

- Charts

- Set type (warmup/drop)

- Timers

- Online backups (right now it's saved to your phone)

- Programmable custom routines using JavaScript (like 5-3-1, progressive overload)

- A suite of default routines

It's a web app because I'm not paying Apple and Google to publish it on the app store.

It seems there are many solutions for social media these days, but only one LinkedIn. Why are we still putting up with it? I’m surprised there’s not been a contender yet, or maybe I am not aware and perhaps that could be the rub; the challenge of acquiring enough traffic for the network effect to take hold.

Does anyone know what this 5k payload is for?

https://justpaste.it/fkqba

Hey all

I'm working on a new project and thinking about alternative funding paths.

Previously I founded a startup around an open source project, had a corporate sponsor, raised VC funding, etc. But something about that feels misaligned with my values. I really tried to make it work and struggled.

I was wondering if anyone has made sponsorship or crowdfunding from users work? I noticed that Kagi the search engine toots that it's entirely user and crowdfunded after being bootstrapped by it's founder. What made something like this work?

Ive got a Huaweii D2 for christmas, and i find it actually very neat. But the data they want from me, and is often required (by having companion apps or activation via personalized shit), is amazing me, even for simple apps. I found out about gadgetbridge, but it does not support everything. Does anyone know more open alternatives to their (JetBrains based) development framework, can i push apps on the watch "the opensource way"?

Today is the worst day of my life. We live in a country near Cambodia, and as you know, it is kind of a dream land for scammers. Today, it happened to my family.

My mother received a call from a scammer. They told her she needed to process some tax issue and prove that her bank account had enough money. In just a few minutes, they tricked her and manipulated her into entering banking OTP codes. All of her savings are now gone.

What makes this more dramatic is that last year I architected and helped a government department in my country build a big system. This system can track money flows across the whole country, to know where money comes from. I was very proud of this. It is the biggest achievement of my life. Even if nobody knows I built it, that was fine.

But now I cannot protect my own mother. I cannot protect my family. My system can track the money, but it is almost impossible to get it back.

When I went to the police, just in one small area, there were more than 20 cases in a single day. A hardworking student sent all their family's money, thinking it was for university fees or going abroad. An old factory worker lost all her retirement savings. So many people lost everything. That is when I realized that the system I built, the system I was proud of, is not enough.

All my own savings are gone too. (My mother was scammed into borrowing a lot of money and sending it to the scammers, and now it is my responsibility.) I had plans for the next few years: to do open source work, to write books about math and programming, to create a dream Go web framework, to give back to the community. Now all of that is gone.

But this is not only about me. I can still start over. I am strong enough to rebuild my life. But who will protect people like my mother? Or a poor student? Or a factory worker? Or so many others?

I can build systems. I can build distributed systems that scale to a whole country. But for what? What should I do?

I have been reading Hacker News for 12 to 13 years, sometimes posting from other accounts. I am writing here now to ask for advice and help from this community.

If anyone has experience with similar cases, or ideas on what can realistically be done, or even advice on how to move forward after something like this, I would really appreciate it. I will keep this account semi-private, because with the details above, I think some engineers from my country may recognize me.

Greetings,

I recently came accross this thread from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34501352

I am interested, in particular, by the comment by vidarh, that starts with:

"You've been given the answer already: Simplicity. You keep ignoring it."

I find myself highly interested in what this person would have to say about rust. Is it better than, for example, oberon, or it's descendents?

I have heard that Rust is a big language. By that definition, a simpler one must be better, right? And yet rust is a big thing, and .. oberon is ..dusty?

I will keep on searching, and maybe attempt to contact him/her/(other?) directly.

I’m looking for ideas to build and open-source.

Curious what problems you expect to matter in the next couple of years.

Thx!

Merry Christmas HN from the antipodes, especially dang and tomhow whose hard work makes this site the special part of the internet that it is.

Cerebras' wafer-scale chips seem like the outperform any of Nvidia's solutions for inference workloads. Since most people run inference in the cloud anyway, why aren't more datacenters being built with this technology instead of Nvidia GPUs? Is it simply a production bottleneck? Given the magnitude of hype around any AI-related advances, I'm surprised that Cerebras doesn't get more press.

A friend and I were talking about a DOS POS system we wrote decades ago. It was crude, handwritten using Turbo Pascal DBF files and somehow still running in a few places since it got pirated.

We no longer have the source. No install disks. No backups. The software survived longer than our memory of it.

It made me realize how often "temporary" work outlives its creators, while the source vanishes.

What’s the most important thing you lost because you assumed you’d back it up later? Code, data, research, art, configs, anything.

Did that loss permanently change how you handle backups?

Would we witness a completely or somewhat materially distinct persona and set of natural talents flourish in the next paradigm of software development? Can we draw parallels when we transitioned from primitive languages to modern ones? Is the modern-day Swift developer materially different from the prior-day C+/Objective-C developer? What is the logical conclusion to this continuum? Do we eventually end up with thoughts being proactively converted into SW experiences for a user at some point? So, a form of diffusion models for UIs and advanced agents handling all the logic and the backend in real-time?

I decided to ask this question because of a rather contrived informal discussion I'm involved in with colleagues from both academia and industry, neither of which are lawyers but who share a few concerns about how we can go about creating new "things" and intellectual property in an increasingly AI-centric world.

You can take prompts as "processes", or "embodiments" or any variation on intellectual property, but I'd love to know what people think about this--my particular concern was that if you ship your software as Open Source, could someone nitpick over your prompts and claim they were taken from their IP/software? How valid would this be given that prompts are, essentially language? How detailed does a prompt need to be to be complex intellectual property that describes a process? Can we consider it as code and an embodiment of a concept?

Discuss. And Happy Holidays!